Introducing picture-suggested responses

February 01, 2017Bots

What is a suggested response?

A suggested response is a keyboard overlay that presents a set of predefined options for the user. It’s a type of menu that overlays the traditional keyboard, allowing a user to select from a series of options instead of typing out a request. We designed suggested responses to provide more fluid control of a chat flow, without having to resort to extremely complicated AI or natural language processing.

How are suggested responses better than conversational chats?

When a user can respond quickly, the chat flow becomes less cumbersome or tedious. A user presented with a menu of relevant choices will stay engaged longer, allowing your bot to provide a valuable experience – like commerce, entertainment, games, lifestyle, fashion and beauty, or any other type of chatbot experience.

We do this in real life. We don’t go to a restaurant and tell the chef how to prepare the meal; we select something delicious from the menu. The chef already knows how to prepare that item and the request is filled (and so is your belly!).

Typed-out/conversational responses can be tedious for the user. Suggested responses solves this problem.

What’s changed with suggested responses?

The API for suggested responses has added a new parameter – metadata – which will allow you to pass additional data to the client, and have that data returned upon selection. This will allow you to separate the text of a suggested response from its programmatic value.

For example:

We’re also adding a new suggested response type, picture-suggested responses, which provide bot developers a new tool in their toolbox for interacting with users. In the example above, the user will see “First response” and “Second response” as options. That text will continue to be sent back to the bot upon selection – existing suggested responses need not change.

However, an additional field will be sent to the bot as well – “metadata”’ – which can contain a string or a dictionary object. This is also passed back to the bot.

This process will give bot developers greater flexibility in how they create their bots. For example, it opens the door for developers to internationalize their bots without altering the bot’s logic.

What is a picture-suggested response?

Much like text-suggested responses, a picture-suggested response is designed to guide the chat flow for the user in a meaningful and entertaining way.A picture-suggested response is a graphical-suggested response. The keyboard contains images, instead of text. In the example at left, the user has four choices.

A graphical menu is more visually stimulating and engaging for the user.

How does it work?

The Kik API presently offers suggested responses through keyboards. Keyboards can be applied to any of the following message types:

text

link

picture

video

Sending a text-suggested response – or keyboard – is straightforward:

When a selection is made, the bot receives the selected response as a text message. The keyboard, or suggested response, is attached to the message being sent to the user. The user is granted the ability to respond with the suggested response, allowing you to efficiently drive your chat flow. A new addition to this feature is the “metadata” field.

Sending a picture-suggested response is very similar to sending a text-suggested response. Consider the following example:

The message, “Here are great items for under $100,” is being sent with four pictures from which the user can choose. The new field – “metadata” – contains information that makes tracking the user’s choices very easy. When the user selects an image in a picture-suggested response, that image is sent back to the bot along with the metadata field:

The metadata field is how we will identify which photo was selected – in this case, item”:”1877836″ and the bot can now process the selection as appropriate.

Mixing and matching responses

Text-suggested responses and picture-suggested responses can be mixed together, provided that the picture-suggested responses precede the text responses in the request.

In the image to the left, an additional text response with the text “Surprise me!” has been added to the keyboards in the request.

This can be useful in providing a default response or prompt for the users to select when none of the picture-suggested responses are relevant to them.

Remember, the text-suggested responses must always come after the picture-suggested responses.

The request is as follows:

What it looks like in action: a demonstration of picture-suggested responses:

Let’s take a look at how this works.

The animation above was recorded using a pre-release version of the Kik client. The bot was simply designed to send a picture-suggested response (very similar to the requests shown above) and return a weblink to the item being tapped.

The metadata field was used to determine which photo response tapped and loaded the correct URL for the weblink as appropriate.

(This is not a mockup. It was recorded from a live demo. No chatters were harmed in the making of this animation.)

Get started!

Suggested responses are already a powerful way to interact with your users; picture-suggested responses expand on them and provide an amazing way to engage and retain chatters.